With the advent of mobile computing, mobile devices have become an integral part of many people's daily lives. It has also created a new behavior during TV viewing, whereby viewers would be using their mobile devices at the same time as watching television (TV). This new behavior can potentially have great implications for the TV industry, since it can transform TV from a one-way broadcast medium into a two-way interactive medium. That is, while the TV can be used for displaying the broadcast content, the mobile devices can be used for interactivity corresponding to the broadcast.
However, due to various factors, currently there is no method to communicate between televisions and mobile devices without the users actively enabling this. Because of this requirement, in majority of the situations the mobile device does not know what the TV is displaying, and the TV does not know what the mobile device is showing. Without this connection in place, the mobile devices cannot be used for TV interactivity, since they are simply standalone devices that happen to be in the same room as the TV.
There is prior art that aim to address this issue, most notably via audio fingerprinting technologies to listen to the TV audio on the mobile device in order to identify what content is being shown on the TV. While this approach can work technically, it requires TV viewers to actively turn on the microphone on their mobile devices for the audio identification. This can be done manually by the user, which can be laborious, or done automatically by listening via the microphone continuously, which is intrusive and can raise privacy concerns since all conversations would be captured.
An alternative is for the mobile device to directly connect to the television or the set-top box over a communications network in order to find out what the TV is showing. This approach is not practical due to the sheer number of different TVs and set-top boxes that people may have, and this path excludes any TVs and devices that do not have networking capabilities, which is still the dominant majority. Another challenge to these approaches is that they require the TV viewers to launch specific applications on their mobile devices in order to connect with their TVs, which is a tall order since mobile devices are used for a multitude of functionalities, such as email, browsing, games, chats, etc.
Therefore, a need exists for a better way to identify when a user of a mobile device might be watching television, and do so in a manner that is non-intrusive and transparent to the users, yet reasonably accurate.
Various prior art arrangements are discussed in the following U.S. prior art documents.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,801,747—describes a method for creating viewer profiles via categories aggregated over programs consumed, using metadata descriptors of the programs. However, it requires knowledge of the exact shows being watched for the profiles to be created and updated.U.S. Pat. No. 6,530,082—describes a method for accompanying TV broadcasts with interactive content designed for viewers to consume alongside the broadcast. By capturing the actions taken by the viewers with respect to the interactive portion, this prior art is able to compile viewership data about the broadcasts. There are three assumptions this prior art needs, one is the creation of the interactive content that's usually manually created, two is that the content is engaging enough to get sufficient numbers of viewers to interact with, and three the viewers would not object to their interactions being tracked. Therefore, this prior is quite complex in the method for which viewership data is collected.U.S. Pat. No. 7,039,928—describes a method for the direct collection of TV viewership data by internet-connected TV devices to report the shows the TVs are showing. This prior art assumes that the TVs need to be connected to the Internet, and that the viewers are willing to have their TVs track their precise consumption patterns.U.S. Pat. No. 7,260,823—describes a method for monitoring a TV watching session, and looking for highest correlation to existing session profiles of the same device to guess which of the individuals within the same household was the viewer. The intended use of this prior art is for the identification of individual viewers, and it requires direct tracking of interactions with the TV devices that the viewers may not be comfortable with.U.S. Pat. No. 7,627,872—describes a method for the identification of media usage via a combination of server and client-side system for monitoring media, and the captured data is reported back to server-side for viewership data collection. This prior art requires viewers' permission and participation for collecting their TV consumption habits in order for the viewership data to be collected and therefore is quite intrusive.U.S. Pat. No. 8,108,888—describes a method for capturing audio samples of TV broadcasts to determine what shows are being consumed. It requires viewers' approval and participation for recording and monitoring their TV viewing behaviors and therefore is quite intrusive.U.S. Pat. No. 8,180,712—describes a method for inferring the on/off state of a TV by sending two signatures of each state to a viewer-side monitoring device. The monitoring devices captures audio samples from the viewer's environment and compare the samples to the two signatures to infer either the on or off state of the viewer's TV. This prior requires the capturing of audio samples of the viewers' environment, and is intrusive and therefore requires viewers' approval due to privacy concerns.U.S. Pat. No. 8,495,680—describes a method for grouping, or clustering, of TV viewers based on behavioral history in order to customize their TV experience. It requires knowledge of TV consumption history of the viewers, as well as pre-selecting demographic groups to aggregate behavioral history. Therefore, it is not well suited for novel and time-sensitive groupings, and it also requires detailed tracking of TV viewers and therefore intrusive.U.S. Pat. No. 8,578,403—describes a method for audience measurement via polling of the viewers and aggregating the response to estimate audience sizes. This method is approximate and requires recruiting viewers to participate in sufficient numbers to improve the accuracy of the viewership data.U.S. Pat. No. 8,600,797—describes a method for inferring demographic data like household income of social network users based on making inference of these demographic attributes for users missing these attributes via similarity to other users who the demographic attributes are known. This prior art can only infer pre-determined attributes where data exists for associating users with these attributes. Therefore, it is not well suited for inferring novel and time-sensitive attributes.U.S. Pat. No. 8,838,522—describes a method for identifying anonymous users to predetermined user groups based on similarity of behavior patterns of known users. Therefore, this prior art requires a cohort of know users, as well as data from these known users' behavior patterns in order for it can infer anonymous users into predetermined user groups.US20100203876—describes a method for inferring demographic categories based on conditional probabilities of users belonging to predetermined categories. This method requires training data to compute conditional probabilities, and cannot infer novel and time-sensitive categories.